Friday, January 27, 2006

Came across this very good discussion on some of the bugs and missing functionalities in Oracle Warehouse Builder. The discussion though started with some of the snags in the OWB but latter on turned out to be a OWB vs Informatica comparision. There were some very good points brought out by the folks out their. I have worked with OWB extensively but have very little exposure to Informatica.The discussion covered fundamental aspects of OWB and Informatica specifilcally and ETL in general. Worth read. Below is interesting snippet. By the way the whole discussion is worth reading

What was really of interest to me was how well the tool works in harmony with the other pieces of the data warehouse (i.e. relational sources and targets as well as external files). And for me, here is a critical point: the Informatica approach to data cleansing and movement is to act upon individual rows which are pulled from a source (often the database), scrubbed, and then placed into the target.

As the core processes of data movement and cleansing continue to be integrated into the database engine, I believe third-party vendors like Informatica will find themselves more and more on the outside looking in. Tools such as Oracle Warehouse Builder are basically frameworks around the database engine core ETL functionality and enhance user productivity by providing the glue to make all of the technological pieces work together. Is it on par with the slickest tools out there? No, not yet.... but "Paris" looms on the horizon.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

I stumble upon this very good Yoga site: www.abc-of-yoga.com. The website covers various aspects of Yoga accurately and with significant details. I learned my first lessons of Yoga through a book I got from my father titled “Be Healthy for 100 years”. The book was written in local language and was focusing more on Asanas (postures). The next set of lessons I learned was at school. We had a veteran teacher for teaching Yoga and Sanskrit. We learned some good lessons on Asanas and pranayam and were able to gracefully do the difficult asanas like Chakra asana. Since then I have been practicing some of these asanas.

Thursday, January 12, 2006

While browsing through few of the entries at IT Toolbox, I came across this post talking about Open webdesign. http://www.openwebdesign.org/ has really great set of templates which could be downloaded and used for small size web applications. I think its one more noble practice happening on the Internet. Sharing information, software, advice, thoughts, ideas or to the matter anything is the mantra of the day in the Internet world.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

I started following some of the Blog categories on IT Toolbox. Apart from blogspot.com this is yet another place I regularly visit these days. Other day I stumble upon this very good entry on SEO (Search engine optimization). Though its been long I have worked with SEO related stuff, this was indeed good post putting together good list of basic SEO consideration while designing web pages. One of the notable point author makes in the beginning of article is that Search bots are enhanced these days to minimize or eliminate tricks used by web designers for a higher Page Ranking on search engines. However author goes on mentioning some things to consider while designing the web page so that its serach engine friendly and gets recognized appropriately by the search engine.

Scott Berkun, is not more guy whom I am following since an year. There are lots of discussions on Project Management, Usability Engineering etc. A series of essays Scott has written are worth read for any one from the software field. Also the PM clinic and UX clinic are good read.

Of late I also started following yet another BI community at http://www.b-eye-network.com. There are interesting set of articles and news related to BI. There are specific vertical channels like Retail, Life sciences that have good bunch of articles worth reading.